Posted!

Join the Conversation

Comments

Welcome to our new and improved comments, which are for subscribers only.
This is a test to see whether we can improve the experience for you.
You do not need a Facebook profile to participate.

You will need to register before adding a comment.
Typed comments will be lost if you are not logged in.

Please be polite.
It's OK to disagree with someone's ideas, but personal attacks, insults, threats, hate speech, advocating violence and other violations can result in a ban.
If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines, please report them.

Tim Burton’s ‘Big Eyes’ loses focus

Gannett Chief Film Critic
Published 3:21 p.m. ET Dec. 24, 2014

Christoph Waltz, left, and Amy Adams appear in a scene from "Big Eyes."(Photo: The Weinstein Company)

“Big Eyes” is a peculiar movie about a peculiar story, which sounds like a perfect vehicle for Tim Burton’s offbeat talents.

Somehow, it isn’t. What’s truly peculiar is how Burton never really gets a handle on the material. Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are both good; she as the artist who created the ubiquitous paintings of waifs with big eyes in the 1950s and ‘60s, he as the husband and huckster who took credit for them. But they handle the material in such different ways at times it’s like they’re not even in the same movie.

Still, the story is just so downright weird that the film can’t help but be compelling. Just not as compelling as it could have been.

When the film opens, Margaret (Adams) is packing up her belongings and her daughter and fleeing to San Francisco, escaping her marriage and beginning a new life as ... well, she’s not quite sure. She is a painter, though, and starts doing caricatures at art festivals; all of them end up with large, oversized, almond-shaped eyes.

Walter Keane (Waltz), another artist (though that’s using the term loosely), is working a booth or two down one day when he wanders over to Margaret and praises her work extravagantly. His own paintings are of Paris street scenes he says were inspired by his art study there. He will reluctantly have to admit that he is not quite making his living as an artist — he’s a realtor, and a successful one. He encourages Margaret’s work with the big-eyed women and children she paints.

They marry, on a whim, and he soon manages to display her work in a nightclub. A fight with the owner leads to headlines and interest, and soon he is selling her work, but taking credit for it. He waves off her concern with some hokum about how they are now one, with a kicker about how no one buys “lady art” anyway.

Margaret is hurt, but when the money starts rolling in — Walter is, if nothing else, a genuinely gifted self-promoter, and charming in spite of himself — she resigns herself to toiling away in relative anonymity, while Walter mass-markets the paintings, goes on talk shows to promote (and defend) them and rakes in the riches.

This is where the performances part ways. Margaret spends her days as a glorified indentured servant, slaving away on canvas after canvas under Walter’s orders to produce, produce, produce. But Adams shows us a growing defiance in Margaret, be it in her work (she begins to tentatively experiment with other subjects) or in her dealings with Walter. This will come to a head after she leaves him and faces off with him in court.

Walter, meanwhile, becomes more demanding, more abusive, able to shift a lie on a dime but eventually can’t keep all the plates spinning. Yet Waltz goes in a curious direction with his performance. He goes broad, making Walter more and more clown-like, a parody of a psychopath. Waltz is clearly having a grand old time of it, but it dilutes the complexity of what should be a fascinating character. His — and Walter’s — performance while defending himself at the trial is difficult to watch, even if that is part of the intent.

Mind you, it’s not a bad performance. Waltz is funny. But it doesn’t mesh with that of Adams, whose Margaret grows more assertive.

Burton reunites with his “Ed Wood” screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski; the three of them again are bringing us the lives of people who think they’re creating art but are ridiculed by the establishment. (Terence Stamp is a blast as the haughty New York Times critic John Canaday, who eviscerates the paintings.) After the reaction to movies like “Dark Shadows” and “Alice in Wonderland,” Burton may feel some empathy.